Talk:Sentience

"The term "sentience" is not used by major artificial intelligence textbooks and researchers."

the claim that AI research, for reasons unknown, would stubbornly refuse to discuss sentience (in any way) strikes me as preposterous. even the citation only provides evidence that four by now dated textbooks (supposedly) do not use the term. k kisses 17:14, 23 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

The current editions of these textbooks do not use the term either. It is simply not a part of mainstream AI research or industry, because it is unclear if it has any relevance to intelligent problem solving. --- CharlesGillingham (talk) 04:48, 6 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

I agree. The fact that discussions of sentience are omitted from more technical discussions of AI doesn't seem to justify the original statement, especially when there are highly cited works on the ethics of artificial intelligence which do indeed discuss sentience. 2001:14BA:A080:B00:59F8:B977:50:39FE (talk) 10:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Doing a "find on page" search using Microsoft Edge, the word "insect" didn't come up. Maybe somebody can think this issue through and write a brief section on it. Me, I'm too busy with other things. Personally, I believe that insects are aware of their existence. Although many people would disagree. They have eyes and are able to see things. And they react like humans when threatened, planning strategies of escape and so on. They seem to react with pain if injured. 2600:8801:B011:300:10B7:8F72:424E:883 (talk) 13:50, 13 May 2021 (UTC) James.Reply

this article is very handwavy about sapience. strange, given there is a section on it. there is a link near the top, in the 'science fiction' section, and then i don't know what. i think a sentence or paragraph describing the differences would help me understand 24.132.57.190 (talk) 19:51, 5 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Yes, there should be an explanation of what sapience is, even though it seems like a pretty vague term. The paragraph may also need to be reworked to be more easily understandable. Alenoach (talk) 13:14, 6 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I ended up removing the paragraph. It was going into a complicated technical digression about brain modularity and whether consciousness is located in a module. And after reading this, you don't really have a clearer idea of what sentient is and which animals are sentient. Not that it was uninteresting, but rather too disconnected from the topic and too technical. And also the fact that it doesn't present an established consensus but rather a debate, with sources that are getting a bit old and are not easily accessible. Alenoach (talk) 23:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

The paragraph "Empirical data on conditioned reflex precision" seems only remotely connected to the topic of sentience. In particular the first sentence: the fact that dogs begin salivating at a larger frequency range in the context of Pavlovian reflexes seems very far-fetched evidence for dogs being less sentient. I don't have access to the provided source, but most writings on on Pavlov reflexes don't even mention sentience. I suggest removing the paragraph. Or a at least removing the first sentence and merging the rest with the previous subsection. Alenoach (talk) 13:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

I reworked the lead, and I'm adding this topic to explain why and provide a space for discussion if needed.

Here are the main concerns that motivate it:

1. Not clear whether that's true: "Sentience is the simplest or most primitive form of cognition".
2. Can't find a source for this claim: "to distinguish it from the ability to think (reason).^{[citation needed]}".
3. Needs some mention of the importance of sentience in ethics.
4. The etymology doesn't seem essential enough to appear in the first paragraph, so I moved it.
5. The first sentence wasn't easy to really understand.

Alenoach (talk) 19:28, 21 July 2024 (UTC)Reply